A suggestion that would improve the NAS products, repair/recover from boot problems

[sbc_memory]

   

I've had some boot issues with a NAS I bought directly from Buffalo and resold to a customer (see my other threads).  In researching the topic I've read many threads where customers have tried different methods to bring back a bricked Buffalo NAS.  I would like to suggest a solution that Buffalo could provide that would make all us customers' lives a million times easier.  Buffalo should offer a small program that can be downloaded from this site, and used to make a bootable CD that creates a small partition on a drive and installs a fresh version of the NAS operating system. 

 

All you would need to do is attach an empty hard drive to your computer and boot off the CD.  Once booted the program on the CD would list the available drives for the user to select from, and once a drive has been selected then the software should ask what NAS device the drive will be going into (TS, TS Pro, Live, etc).  Once that's been picked the software would create a small partition and install the software.  Then the user can put that drive and 3 other blank drives in the TS, boot up, and create their desired RAID partition via the GUI.

 

No headaches.  No FTP issues, no worries about whether you properly formatted the drives, no UNIX experience needed, just a simple user-friendly solution to wipe your TS and start over.

 

If you're an end user reading this and agree, please reply to this thread and add your vote.  Hopefully if enough customers ask for this they'll do it... which would make all our lives easier. It would also benefit Buffalo by reducing product support requests... or at least make answering certain support calls simpler.  All they'd have to do is point the customer to one thread and tell them use this small program to reinstall your NAS software & start over with a clean install.

[gquiring]

   

I wonder if the USB port on their NAS products could be booted from with a Flash drive.  Otherwise they would have to develop a boot CD for PC's and Macintosh.  The Flash drive would be easier too, no foreign equipment to deal with.  Making boot CD's is a somewhat large support issue, many motherboards with different NICS and other chipsets to deal with. 

 

But I 100% agree with you, I recently bought a LS Quad and it was not easy to upgrade the drives in the unit.  Why they put the boot code on the drives instead of flash ram was a poor idea.